On 2004-11-16, Peter Simons
I know memory is expensive, that's why only the last two digits of year numbers are stored. :-]
I understand what you're getting at -- and I find it annoying, too, when people sacrifice robustness for comfort.
In this particular case, the printf functions without the leading "v" operate on a list in the manner some have suggested. I find the "v" forms preferable since they are easier to type, though I understand the case against them.
the conclusion that for this particular use-case hard-coded place-holders (like %s, %d, etc.) are not that useful. You'd like to be able to (easily!) extend the function, to offer a more general variable substitution, like sh(1) does. So that you could write
Dear ${customer},
Indeed, I've already done that in the Python style. From [1]: ----------------- As a special extension to the printf() format string syntax, special functions can take a key name in the format string. This key will then be looked up in an association list or FiniteMap passed in. Python programmers will find this very similar to Python's % operator, which can look up inside dicts. Here's an example: import MissingH.Printf al = [("item1", v "Test One"), ("blah", v (5::Int)), ("zip", v (3.14::Float))] main :: IO () main = do printfAL "%(item1)s: %(blah)03d, %(zip)06.3f; %(item1)s\n" al This will print: Test One: 005, 03.140; Test One ------------------- There are also printfFM functions that work with FiniteMaps in a similar manner. [1] http://gopher.quux.org:70/devel/missingh/html/MissingH.Printf.html#6